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"Some birds aren't meant to be caged, their feathers are just too bright"- Morgan Freeman, Shawshank Redemption. This blog is from one such bird who couldn't be caged by organizations who mandate scripted software testing. Pradeep Soundararajan welcomes you to this blog and wishes you a good time here and even otherwise.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Experience Report : BWST 2

Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing stepped into its 2nd year on April 3rd, 2010. Why wouldn't it?
This time, it was much more organized than BWST 1. Of course, we learn some lessons, if not all, when we do something.

The groundwork required announcing it on my blog, managing the registrations, speaker invites, cancellations, getting sponsorship, managing the budget, conference and hotel booking. As we had Selim Mia from Bangladesh as a participant, the work also involved helping Selim getting a Visa to India. Santhosh and Parimala were of good help for me in the ground work.

So, the D-day arrived. Some new faces and some old started dropping a couple of minutes earlier to the start time published to them. What? An Indian conference happening on time? That's crazy ain't it? So, till the time arrived some participants started to discuss about Left, Right, Neutral of Politics, Democracy, India and more.

We started off at 9 AM with a check in & self introduction from all participants and Parimala explaining the rules of the day and how to use K cards. She announced herself as Kaali Maata for the day who would facilitate the workshop.

Sharath Byregowda's talk on "How he cleared the trap that prevented him from attending BWST2"

What better way to start than to get a guy who was not likely to attend BWST2 because he had to be in office for someone's estimation being the biggest ever blunder committed. Sharath talked how he cleared the trap to be able to attend BWST2. While he was talking, lots of green cards started popping up. He explained how bugs (that were show stoppers) allowed the test team to buy some time while the development team were fixing them.

Rahul Verma raised a question, "How can you go and look for show stoppers? Isn't it only when you find a bug you'd know if it is a show stopper?". That triggered some red, blue and green cards to show up. The discussion shifted from that to Severity, Priority and flowed into certifications. Sharath talked about the experience he had in proposing BBST course in his organization.

Ashok's talk on Metrics

So, Ashok T, CEO of Stag Software brought in his wide experience of dealing with metrics and questioned what metrics made sense. He talked about metrics used in various stages of software development and testing and shared his experiences of working with several clients on them. He talked about having helped his clients understand that collecting all these metrics is good but do we really know why we are doing it and what is our goal?

Discussions evolved around metrics and estimation. Not in anyone's experience there, an estimation had gone right. Rahul Mirakhur had to say, "If you get the estimate right, then its not right". There appeared to be a lot of interest from most people to try to get estimation right. I don't think anyone should try getting their estimation right because that is not the only thing that would be helpful to the clients they work for.

Selim Mia

We had a participant and speaker from Bangladesh, Selim Mia. Such passion is great to see and experience. He traveled by train from Bangladesh to Bangalore and back. The moment he stood up, everyone asked him a question unanimously : Please tell us how is testing done in Bangladesh? He had to answer that before he could proceed on his planned talk. I personally think there is lot of potential in Bangladesh but I also hope they avoid falling to traps that we have fallen into.

Selim had a combo for us : An experience report and sought answers to questions he had as a test manager. Based on what he said it occurred to me that the senior management there at Bangladesh were in for results. So, sometimes they gave enough freedom to testers to achieve results - which is good.

Discussions returned to estimation, metrics, scripted and exploratory testing. Vipul had been to Bangladesh, so he shared his experience of interacting with people there and termed it "pleasant". Two names that Indians now know from Bangladesh is "Sajjadul Hakim" and "Selim Mia". I think its time we know more.

Lunch

BWST 1 taught us a few lessons. We went out for lunch and in search of a hotel and spent about 2 hours in BWST 1 on it. This time we organized it in the same hotel and hence we saved a lot of time. We spent munching a good lunch for 50 minutes and then got back to action. Good lunch, I liked the soup & noodles!

Rahul Verma

I was invited to a conference in Germany and I couldn't make it. Instead of me, Rahul Verma did and I think it was a good thing to have happened for the conference. I believe Rahul Verma can deliver the blows that audience needs and that is exactly what he did. His presentation was an exploration into what crap, trap and good means to you versus to those whom you report to or to who reports to you. He delivered some punches to bloggers like me, which I welcome :)

He shared a few experience reports from his office and then led to asking us if we do have an opinion about what we say and how did we arrive at it? He left with a message saying, "Evaluate"

Those who probably did not know Rahul Verma were probably pleasantly shocked by his presentation and I argued over having an opinion and not having an opinion. I feel opinions are in making. Not expressing opinions could be dangerous in some situations while expressing it could be dangerous in a few others.

Vipul Kocher

Testers break rules. Good testers know when it is safe to break rules. So did Vipul. He cut the crap about crap in the theme and focused on helping us learn the Noun and Verb technique of generating test ideas. The first thing that strikes is his acknowledgment to Elizabeth Hendrickson. It is a strong message to the testing community to owe credits to someone who has helped an idea to be helpful to a larger mass of testing community. Although "Noun and Verb" technique was unheard to many, they did enjoy learning it from someone who had implemented it in the past and shall continue to work on it. I usually don't run out of test ideas and I think through his presentation, the likeliness of me running out of test ideas has further reduced.

Ashok had questions to ask about Noun and Verb technique and I found them interesting. I too have plenty of questions about it but I am going to be working on it for a while before I try to find out answers. There were a few junior level testers who were at BWST this time such as Sai Divya & Shwetha Ghorpade who acknowledged that it will be interesting to implement the technique at their work.

Meeta Prakash

Meeta hit the bell. She took the word crap from the theme and thought about one of the crappiest thing at work - meeting. Her session didnt need any facilitation. She kept polling the audience and questioning things about meeting. It was interesting to know every person except Allmas (lucky Indian) thought there was a lot of time being wasted in meeting. Sometimes people not needed are pulled into a meeting or other times people who are most needed in the meeting are left out because they speak truth. I got reminded of a meeting money burn meter that I saw sometime back which shows how many dollars are burnt in the meeting.

The discussion was interesting. I was reminded of one my ex-manager whose meeting only gets over when his wife calls him. Those who reported to him felt his wife was a savior and a viking.People brought in their experiences of craps and traps of meeting. I once worked for a CMM Level 3 company who was trying hard to achieve CMM Level 5 status. An SEPG team in there ( don't know SEPG : Software Engineering Process Group ) wasted a lot of our testing time. SEPG team ensures that a spelling mistake bug is as expensive as a database corruption by involving the whole team to do a root cause analysis of how the spelling mistake bug went unnoticed. Vasu brought in his experience of how he learned to handle customers diligently by observing his manager handle it in a meeting. Allmas is way too lucky. She appears to have a team that handles meeting so well. Don't envy her, she is going to be as unlucky as you when she moves out of the organization.

Sukanta Bhatt

Oh this man! The stories he shared on testing medical devices got people doing two things - laughing while thinking. People didn't seem to want him stop. He shared experiences that led to discover new things and realize the value of interacting with customers and being at the customers place watching them how they use the product we develop and test. Was a cool way to end BWST 2 presentations.

Jantha (participants) got curious about medical applications and devices testing space and started to pound him with questions and asking more experience reports on medical devices. Well, that happened over a beer.

Checkout

So, when the bell rang at 5:30 PM, we officially concluded BWST 2. Before we did that, we had a checkout in which each person given less than a minute were asked to talk about one take-away from the whole day. Rahul Verma and Sharath believe that it was cruel of me to ask for "one" takeaway while there were lots. Not that others had just one but these people voiced their opinions about it. The flip side is if someone who is new to this concept of BWST and had been all silent, is easy for them to talk about one take way unlike others who are practiced to speaking a lot.

Ashok & Vipul

The audience weren't exhausted. So, they ignored my call for heading to a pub nearby and asked Ashok and Vipul to talk about experience of running a testing services organization. Questions were posed about China, US, Europe and ANZ regions. The thrust was how do we as Indian testers do better.

Photoshoot

So, we all got shot at the end by one of the hotel staff :)

Beer in Pub

We decided to catch up in Enigma, the Pub @ Koramangala and testers rocked the place. A couple of pitchers and soft drink went in. Girls who had been to BWST 2 also accompanied us to a pub as they knew they are hanging out with some of the gentlemen of the industry. That's it.

Small observation. Meeting with support from ISTQB (i see link to ISTQB and not Pure Testing). Is this some sort of acceptance? Or just co-existence? Could have been better if the article was also tagged with ISTQB if that was the case.

This is Nusrat from Bangladesh. I am new to this blog. After reading the Experience Report -BWST-2 I realized I missed that opportunity. I really want to participate in the next BWST-3. So that I can organize such organization in my country :). Anyway any date for BWST-3?

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Tester Tested! by Pradeep Soundararajan is licensed under Creative Commons. You must owe credits to Pradeep Soundararajan when you copy paste anything from here by mentioning the name and proper linking to the post. You are not allowed to edit any of the post without permission. For permissions, write to pradeep.srajan@gmail.com